No border agent, without a warrant, will be able to compel an entire notebook + data inspection. I can turn it on, I can even boot it, and I've had to do that before for a US border agent. Since the volume is hidden, and it's encrypted, you would have no way to determine what is it, easily, or what it contains, in any pleasable reality.

I don't think he should be charged, a warrant wasn't issued for the data, so the data wasn't legally compelled. Therefore, what he destroyed at best was just requested data, and what he chose to hand over was no requested data. The stupidity of it, he had to know what was going to happen! The government, no government, is your friend. They're public servants in name, but not in accountability, and he had to know the government was going to turn his life upside down from doing that.

My Prius Prime has a large infotainment touch screen, and it's been replaced 6 times, the last time I had to pay for the replacement when the glass shattered on a cold winter day. They introduce needless complexity, they're distracting, and don't really serve a purpose. Why do I need a large tablet in my car? My old Corolla had a small touch screen, that could do everything, so frankly, I don't need or want a large touch screen.

I was at Walmart yesterday, the 21st of August 2026, and I used Google Wallet to tap my debit card. Maybe this is a US thing, I've been taping my phone to pay at Walmart for at least a year, if not longer.

Before I travel I back up my phone to a hidden encrypted VeraCrypt volume, then wipe it. I've done the same with my tablet, and ereader, and it's just the sensible thing to do, you can restore it at the destination. I don't have anything incriminating on my phone, but, the government has no right to any of that data, for any reason. The issue here, is that he intentionally destroyed the data when it as in the hands of a government agent, which you only do if there is some reason to destroy it. If you back up and wipe a device beforehand, that's just sensible data hygiene. If you wipe the device in the hands of law enforcement, or a government actor, what possible reason did you have for doing that? Even if you're entirely innocent, why did you do that, instead of securing the device before you left?

Should he be charged with anything, no, but, did he do something stupid? Yes!

Yes, and that is a real issue, so you have to be careful, but, forgoing that, have multiple AI agents run the code. I've used OpenAI, Claude, Junie, at the same time, and it's interesting to see how they approach the issue.

I love AI for bug hunting, it's fantastic, providing you keep it narrow, and focused. One of my techniques is to have the AI explain the code block I'm looking at, in detail, with examples, and then as we hunt, keep explaining how X, Y, A, B all link, using examples. What would take a week, or a month manually, can be done in a day, maybe two, and it's fantastic.

When I was taking advanced vector calculus 2, we were working out points in Nth dimensional space. In one lecture the professor Alek was trying to show us symbolically where a point in 12th dimensional space was. He had white board marker in between his fingers, and he was rotating both of his hands to show us where this point was. We were working with advanced antenna design, trying to optimize for noise, strength, stability, and some other properties. The thing was, he had the point in the mirrored position, and I symbolically got it right away, that he had the right alignment, but it was flipped, it's really difficult to accurately describe, but think of a classic X, Y, Z plot. Basically, he had the point at X = 1, when it was X = -1, much more complicated, but that's the idea. The entire lecture was him and me arguing about this point, and the reason it mattered was due to stability, noise, and strength of the antenna. To be fair, the point being mirrored didn't cause everything to fail, or have terrible performance, it was just less than ideal. After nearly an hour of this discussion, he put it to me to design my antenna using the mirrored point, and sure enough, my antenna was just a slight bit more stable, noise resistant, and its strength was better.

What is the point of that story? We're not teaching kids, in my experience, how to think about the problem being solved. They're running through the motions, they get an answer, they don't care, and they move on. When it's long division or simple multiplication, okay, fine, but, when you move on, and you're starting trig, or applied math, now it matters. Is your fraction correct? How do you know? How do you check? Regardless if you're doing the box thing, or a ribbon (I don't know what that is), or something else that's new, it all has to build on the fundamentals.

Teach the box method, that's fine, but also teach the classic method, and show kids how to contrast them, and if they disagree, how to try and figure out why? What really triggers me about this, if a kid completely misunderstood the plot to a story, it wouldn't be taken lightly, or shrugged off. If they don't understand why you should respect a persons pronouns, again, it would not be shrugged off. When it comes to math, it's shrugged off, and I've worked with Jr Engineers who couldn't tell you whether X should be between 2 and 10 or in a literal case, 2 trillion and 5 trillion. In that specific case, they used one method to compute X, instead of two, three or four methods. They didn't grasp what X was, and why it mattered, the value was 7.something, and that lack of awareness, will never fail to bother me.

As for the drawing stuff, have them do it once, twice, or several times, but if they can show they understand, then cut it out. The answer is what matters, but in between the question and the answer, let them solve it their own way, providing they get the right answer, and can defend that answer.

You can blame the parents if the parents are clueless, and don't get involved. I got involved, you don't end up messaging a textbook author unless you're invested. I didn't mind the method being confusing, but the teacher not realizing the issue, is a major part of the issue! That same teacher use to joke that "Word problems are confusing, and I usually don't understand them.", if you don't understand the question, there are two possibilities. The first, the question is just stupid and needs to be reworked, that happens. The other, you're not qualified to teach that subject, and it was definitely more of the second.

I was tutoring both of them, but they found it stressful, which is fair enough. It might be relevant that I'm engineer and have taken more math courses then any human should take. I didn't just take calculus, I took calculus, advanced calculus, vector calc, advanced vector calc, it goes on and on. We ended up getting a private tutor for them, to literally start at grade 1 level math, and work them up to their grade level. The tutor had to unteach a metric crap load of useless information, and the other week said something like: "Schools don't want to teach math, they want to understand how math makes you feel.", that's pretty close to what she said, but what she was getting at was math has turned from a drill and practice subject, to emotions, something math doesn't need.

Your example is great 20 x 14 is 10 x 14 x 2, which is precisely how I would calculate that in my head. 22 x 14 is (10 x 14 x 2) + (14 x 2). That's easy to do once you understand it, but the schools don't teach that, I can't explain the way they teach it, it's beyond me, it involved boxes, counting, colours, it was f'ing insane. To be fair, I understood what they were trying to show, and that section of the textbook was "fine", it worked, you could do steps 1,2,3,4,5 and nothing was missing, but it was confusing.

I don't understand why it needed to change, it didn't. The fundamentals work, so why did they get redesigned?

We did work through the math homework, and I showed them how to do it correctly, or traditional, long division, short division, actually following sensible steps. My daughter did one of her math tests using the time tested methodology, and we got a note home that she needs to follow the methods shown in class. How can she follow them when they don't work? Not subjectively don't work, objectively don't work, there were steps missing from the textbook, how did a teacher not notice that, and even worse, why did she argue me when I pointed that out?

Excellent take! She used AI for research, probably to proofread, so what? As you said, let's focus on the lack of basic math skills that student have developed. I have one daughter who just finished grade 11, and one who just finished grade 8, both have the math skills of a grade 3 student. The schools kept telling us bullshit like: "She can work with numbers, like the great math geniuses of all time." If I ask either of my daughters to multiple 20 x 14 in their head, they will honestly take 5+ minutes, and likely get the wrong answer.

Forget calculus 1, I would be happy with basic multiplication, division and fractions. Schools treat math like it's the annoying extra course that you need to take, but doesn't matter, so they'll give you an A, and you're fine. Let's start teaching calculus in primary school, just the basics, which any student should be able to handle easily.

Do you blame the students, do you blame the teachers, or the curriculum, where is the blame to start? I've told the story on Slashdot a few times that my daughters would bring math homework home, and it would be the most confusing, idiotic, stupid, ridiculous "new math" style homework. In a few cases trying to quiz them, they couldn't explain the method to me, but fair enough, they're not teachers. When I asked the teachers to explain it to me, they couldn't. It wasn't that I'm dumb and couldn't figure it out, there were steps missing, the old meme 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, is what was happening.

I modelled one of the questions in Octave, and proved there was a step missing, when I confronted the teacher over it, she refused to listen, then insisted I was wrong, but never explained what I had wrong. Sure enough, I wrote the textbook author, and she was able to explain the issue, there was a literal step missing from the textbook. She explained how to do the method correctly, it was still idiotic, and ridiculous, but how did a teacher not notice that issue?

We've basically taken a simple area of education, and turned it into a cluster bleep of unintelligent nonsense, that can't be passed onto a generation, and then we're amazed kids can't figure anything out. It doesn't help that kids in primary school are told they need calculators! A calculator, for what? What do you need a calculator for in primary math? If you can't do 1 x 1 -> 20 x 20 in your head, a calculator won't help. If you can't convert easy fractions in your head, a calculator won't fix that. We've failed to teach math, and instead of realizing that, we're blaming a professor for leveraging AI in a reasonably sensible manner because it's all handwaving and excuses.

How many interactions are used to calculate that number? 99.98% would mean 1 in 5 000 are false matches. Given this is an AI system that has to work with live data, and a complex live system, getting false matches to 1 in 5 000 sounds remarkable. To get an accurate reading, you would need a population of 500 000 (100x), and I would want a 5 000 000 point sample, since that would 1000x the base rate, which at that point would be large enough I'd trust the 99.98%.

To put 99.98% in prospective, giving the average year has 525 960 minutes, that would mean a failure of 105.192 minutes, or just under 2 hours, in a year. That's the type of downtime accepted by tier 1 ISPs, or Data Centres. Azure, for instance, only promises 99.95% for critical infrastructure, and GCP, AWS, Digital Ocean, OVH and the like will be around the same.

Do they honestly want me to believe that an AI system is operating, under a fair sampling, at a rate more accurate than cloud service providers? I really want to see that data, and the number of samples used, I don't believe it.

Why would Windows go up in cost at all? Does Microsoft really want to play this game? Conservatively, Linux and Unix systems make up ~85% of all computers, and if you just look at the desktop market, Microsoft is losing ground to Unix and Linux-based systems, where Windows has ~71% of the submarket, where Windows 11 makes up ~50% of desktops. What does Linux struggle with anymore? Honestly, can anyone name something where Linux presents a large flashing roadblock? Apart from specialized, or old software that is simply locked on Windows, and can't be run with Wine, what else is there?

The only market where Microsoft has any hold is the desktop, and that's going away quickly. If Microsoft wants to hold on to Windows, they need to make massive changes, including, giving it away for free. You don't need to buy a Windows license with a new computer purchase, so if I can save $200+ on a notebook, that's already as of the 17th of August 2026, runs about $6k, regardless that I would have already skipped it, I'll skip it.

I believe that number, in any case they should have a reasonable local backup, it's insane to skip that.